While it once was the shizzle, ie in the 1990s, I agree with this guy re; Microsoft Word:
it needs to fucking go:
What makes Word unbearable is the output. Like the fax machine, Word was designed to put things on paper. It was a tool of the desktop-publishing revolution, allowing ordinary computer users to make professional (or at least approximately professional) document layouts and to print them out. That's great if you're making a lot of church bulletins or lost-dog fliers. Keep on using Word. (Maybe keep better track of your dog, though.)
For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.
Like the author of this post, I wrote my book in Word, but you couldn't pay me to do anything else on it other than get a word count for something. I use Stickies or my Mail program instead of TextEdit, but the idea is the same. And I especially can relate to this bit:
My own latest copy of Word won't launch a new blank document without demanding that I identify which of a half-dozen kinds of project files—most of which are meaningless to me—I'm trying to create
I have never, EVER clicked on anything other than CANCEL/NEW DOCUMENT -oooooooh, now I see I can select from a horrifyingly specific set of newsletter sizes! Awesome!
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